ational saying.
For me, it became a reminder that difficult circumstances do not give us the luxury of waiting for certainty.
We still have to lead.
Leadership When the Answers Are Unclear
One of the lessons I have learned over the course of my career is that leadership is often less about having the right answer than it is about making the best decision you can with the information available.
That was true in healthcare.
It was true in business.
It was true during the pandemic.
And it remains true today.
There are periods when circumstances change faster than organizations can respond. Markets shift. Costs increase. Employees have different expectations. Customers behave differently. Technology changes the way business is conducted.
The temptation is to wait until things become clearer.
Sometimes that is the right decision.
Often, it is not.
Leaders have to distinguish between the things they can control and the things they cannot.
You cannot control the economy.
You cannot control a pandemic.
You cannot control every change in the marketplace.
But you can control how you respond.
You can gather information.
You can ask better questions.
You can make adjustments.
And you can keep moving.
Change Is Not Always the Enemy
After more than 30 years in leadership, I have become less interested in avoiding change and more interested in understanding it.
Change can be disruptive.
It can also create opportunities that would not otherwise exist.
Some of the most significant changes in my own career were not changes I would have chosen at the time.
Others were deliberate.
The important lesson was the same.
Once circumstances change, you have to decide what you are going to do with the new reality.
That requires perspective.
It also requires the ability to let go of what no longer works.
Organizations can become attached to the way things have always been done. Leaders can do the same thing personally.
Experience should not make us resistant to change.
It should make us better at recognizing when change is necessary.
The Value of Perspective
Looking back, what I remember most about that period in Paris is not the uncertainty.
It is the realization that uncertainty is part of leadership.
We often imagine that experienced leaders have somehow learned how to eliminate risk and uncertainty.
They have not.
They have simply accumulated enough experience to understand that difficult periods eventually change.
The circumstances may not return to exactly what they were before.
The organization may look different.
The leader may look different.
But the situation changes.
That perspective matters.
It prevents a difficult period from becoming a permanent definition of the future.
Tough Times Do Not Last
I do not know whether the person who wrote that advertisement in Paris knew how much those words would mean to someone passing by.
Probably not.
But that is sometimes how leadership lessons arrive.
They do not always come from a boardroom, a textbook or a management seminar.
Sometimes they come from a sentence on a wall when you need to hear it.
“Tough times don't last. Tough people do.”
I have thought about that sentence many times since.
Not because I believe resilience means simply enduring whatever happens.
Resilience is more useful than that.
It means adapting.
It means making decisions when the outcome is uncertain.
It means accepting that some things are outside your control while remaining accountable for the things that are.
And perhaps most importantly, it means continuing to build.
What Comes Next
The pandemic eventually passed.
The business survived.
But the experience left me with a different understanding of change.
We cannot build our careers or our organizations around the assumption that circumstances will remain stable.
They will not.
The question is what we do when they change.
That is where leadership becomes real.
Not when everything is working.
Not when the plan is unfolding exactly as expected.
But when the plan changes, the circumstances become difficult and you still have to decide what comes next.
That advertisement in Paris gave me a little fortitude at a time when I needed it.
Years later, I still remember it.
Perhaps that is the simplest lesson of all.
Tough times do not last.
What matters is what we learn, how we adapt and what we choose to build when they are over.